[meddlepal]

You'd have to reinvent a lot of wheels to replicate what Gradle (or Maven) does. For example dependency management, env setup and packaging. It would be similar to asking a Python developer to give up pip, setup/disttools and maybe virtualenv. In the end you want productive devs. Stripping away the tools they are productive with is counterproductive.

[Chris2048]

But surely these are targets for make?

e.g a pip target that builds a python dep folder. You can do the same for Java with Apache Ivy.

Is Gradle not a make like system with a lot of JVM-specific functionality built in?